Wrap your lump of cod’s roe tightly in foil, covering it a few times to ensure that the parcel is watertight. Put the ball of foil into a large saucepan of boiling water, cover with a lid and boil for 20 minutes. Remove the parcel and unwrap the foil, being careful not to burn your fingers. Slice the cooked roe.
Remove the outer leaves from the fresh sweetcorn if that’s what you’re using. Put the leaves in a paper bag and stick them in the fridge for Tomorrow’s Tamales (see page 42). With a small sharp knife, cut off the corn kernels, cutting as close to the woody inside stem as possible to avoid wasting the corn. If you don’t have fresh ears of corn, open the tin of sweetcorn and drain.
Heat the oil in a cast iron char-grilling pan, or a medium frying pan, over a medium heat. When it’s warm, throw in the corn, onion and peas, and cook for a couple of minutes. Then add the cod’s roe slices, garlic, peppers, tomatoes, half the fresh chilli and the Worcestershire sauce. Turn the heat down to low and cook for about 5 more minutes, turning the fish roe and vegetables now and then so that they char, caramelize and cook, but don’t burn.
Meanwhile, prepare the avocado. With a sharp knife, cut through the skin right down to the stone and slice along the length of the fruit around the whole circumference. Twist the two halves in opposite directions so the avocado opens into two halves. Remove the stone and slice the flesh with the back of your knife through to the skin, but don’t cut the skin. Do this again the opposite way to make cubes, which you can easily remove from the skin with your fingers. Put the diced avocado flesh into a bowl and squash it with a fork. Add the remaining half of the chilli, the coriander and the lemon juice, and squash together some more.
Put the guacamole on the table, along with the jar of pepperoncino and the pot of yogurt. If you’re feeling fancy, you could spoon them into nice bowls instead. Tip the cod’s roe and vegetable mixture into a nice big bowl and put that out, too, plus the warm tortillas. Make sure there are lots of spoons so everyone can help themselves. Let everyone put whatever fillings they want onto their tortilla and roll them themselves for messy, spicy finger food.
PS If you’ve freshly made your tortillas, then they’ll be nice and warm and ready to roll. If your tortillas have been sitting in the fridge, put them onto a plate over a saucepan of boiling water, cover with a tea towel and heat for 10 minutes.
SLOW ROASTED GARLICKY TOMATOES
with Tymsboro’ Cheese and Watercress
This is a lunch idea for all those lucky people who don’t go out to work. Freelances, mums, people recovering from an illness, and students are the main ones that come to mind. Being at home means you can easily whack the tomatoes in the oven around about the time you break for elevenses. That way, when lunchtime comes, you’ll be eating a culinary delicacy without having to lift a finger.
Tymsboro’ is a fantastic artisan-made English goat’s cheese, dusted in salt and charcoal and shaped like a pyramid without the top. It’s pretty exciting, because it’s liquid around the edges, but is harder inside, which gives it a great contrast and balance of consistency. It is, however, unpasteurized so pregnant women will have to skip this one until the bun is out the oven. The rest of you can read on …
It’s an unpasteurized and seasonal cheese, as the maker believes in doing things the old way. Mary Holbrook makes the cheese at Sleight Farm, in the Mendips, just south of Bath. She’s got together a flock of naughty goats that are three ancient heirloom breeds: British Saanen, British Alpine and Anglo-Nubian goats. Not only are they well suited to life in the Mendips, they make great tasting milk with just the right amount of fat to make creamy Tymsboro’ cheese.
And they’re all naughty because, being goats, they just can’t help it. There are about 90 goats in Mary’s flock and there’s nothing they like better than running away. It’s not that they don’t like life at Sleight Farm, it’s just that they love being bad. They’re fussy eaters, too, who prefer nettles and thistles to lots of grass. But they’re in luck, because Mary’s fields are full of wild weeds and meadow flowers instead of the usual mono-culture of grass, grass and more grass. This isn’t just out of kindness to her goats. Mary knows that a mixture of wild plants in their diet means lovely fragrant milk for her cheeses.
Mary basically adopted the French method for making traditional charcoal-coated goat’s cheese, then developed it and made it her own. She uses the very freshest goat’s milk to start off the cheese-making process – it’s never any older than milk that’s been milked from the goats the night before. That’s why the cheese is seasonal, as the goats like making milk from spring through to autumn, resting up over the winter in nice cosy straw-lined barns.
To get the cheese-making process going, Mary gently heats the milk (but doesn’t pasteurize it), adds a culture and a tiny bit of rennet, then leaves the liquid for 24 hours to make a soft curd. This is where the real skill and cheese-making flair comes in, because the way you handle this delicate curd will deeply affect the final flavour of the cheese. It’s fragile stuff, as the fat globules in the goat’s milk are small and easily broken, spoiling the cheese’s consistency, too. This is also what makes goat’s milk more easily digestible by people than cow’s milk.
So slowly and very carefully, the curds are spooned into the moulds, ready to be matured over the next three to four weeks. Penicillin in the ripening room’s air naturally makes a beeline for the little pyramids, finishing the maturing process. The cheeses are then turned out of the moulds and dusted with salt and charcoal ready to be sent to us.
But why pyramids without tops? It’s another French thing … Apparently Napoleon was sitting by a traditional French pyramid-shaped goat’s cheese when he was told that his army hadn’t managed to invade and conquer Egypt. His first reaction was to chop off the top of the pyramid in an act of defiance – bet that taught the pesky Egyptians who was boss.
The finished Tymsboro’ cheese has an almondy-lemony flavour, which the acidity of the slow-roasted tomatoes sets off perfectly.
And if you make more slow-roasted tomatoes than you need, you can store them in jars filled with olive oil ready for next time.
Fresh & Wild’s watercress is grown by John Hurd at his farm in Wiltshire. John’s been growing watercress for over 50 years, so what he doesn’t know about it can be written on a stamp. It’s one of the most difficult salad crops to grow, as it’s not grown in soil like most other plants. Instead, watercress is grown in shallow trays filled with a precise mixture of layered gravels and sands. These beds are then flooded with freshly drawn spring water from the freshwater springs deep in the chalky Wiltshire grounds of the farm, with up to half a million gallons of spring water flowing through each acre every day.
John invented the techniques needed to grow watercress organically on a large enough scale to supply shops. Previously, large-scale watercress farms in the UK routinely used copious amounts of molluscicides, pesticides that are designed to specifically kill slugs and snails. In fact, nonorganic watercress farms still do, hence non-organic watercress is one of the most pesticide-rich crops you can buy.
Slugs and snails would love to live in John’s organic watercress trays and munch our tasty peppery greens, but he’s worked out a way to keep the trays snail and slug free without resorting to poisonous chemicals. This is a real breakthrough, as watercress farms were plagued in the 1910s and 1920s with a type of snail that passes on liver fluke to the people that eat it. John Hurd’s meticulous organic cleansing methods ensure that the organic watercress we eat today is free of both nasty molluscicides and potentially sickness-causing beasties.
The strong peppery taste of watercress is a real wake-up call to the senses, and it’s full of get-up-and-go vitamins, too. As John says: ‘Watercress contains more vitamin C than fresh oranges